Information related to any business is recorded in different ways based on the nature of the business and the media it is recorded on. The recorded information is accessed using some form of index or indicia. The term “indicia’ as used throughout herein means an identifier for an object, article, component, assembly structures and others. One example, of such indicia (or identifier) in a manufacturing environment is a part number that is used to identify different components/assemblies.
When electronic information is recorded various errors or variations may occur due to various reasons. For example, there could be manual keying errors or errors due to difficulty reading hand-written notes. When trying to identify words read from forms that have been filled out by hand, problems beyond the normal spelling errors occur, and the error rate is much greater than machine printed characters. When attempting to form optical character recognition (OCR) of even reasonably clearly printed machine character strings, an OCR system will create insertion, deletion, substitution and segmentation errors. These normal OCR errors are compounded by normal handwriting errors. These errors include poorly formed letters, non-standard orientations, poor spacing between letters, and the normal variety in the types of pens and pencils used to write with.
Variations in recording information in a business can vary due to different individuals and organizations within the business following different conventions in recording the information. Individuals and organizations have different conventions for entering indicia information in design, production, inventory, ordering, maintenance, etc. These variations/errors make it difficult to correlate information, and perform various aggregation, summarization, and integration operations. Reconciling various indicia can become cumbersome and sometimes result in duplication of records for the same indicia.
In manufacturing and retail environment, part numbers are predominantly used to identify different components/assemblies. The part numbers are entered in various stages of manufacturing/retail. Errors in part numbers can cause various problems including accounting, part traceability, and warranty issues if there are any failures, and others.
Conventional systems fail to address the foregoing problems efficiently. There is, therefore, a need for a method and system to address the structure of these recorded information (for example, part numbers) to enable accurate record matching and reconciliation.